Netflix is airing Anne with an E, a new series based on the novel Anne of Green Gables, written by Lucy Maude Montgomery in 1908. It’s getting a lot of good reviews, such as The Atlantic’s, titled “Anne with an E Is the Best Kind of Adaptation.” But not all of the press is positive. The show has a darker edge—for instance, revealing more of the harshness of Anne’s back story before her adoption. This has prompted Vanity Fair‘s critique, “Anne of Green Gables: Netflix’s Bleak Adaptation Get’s It All So Terribly Wrong.”
I haven’t seen any of the show, but I’d be willing to give it a shot (if I had Netflix). I like Anne Shirley and her way with words and, by her own admission, words and words and words and words.
I heard a clip from the opening episode, in which Anne is with the stoic Matthew Cuthbert on the way to her new home on Prince Edward Island. She sees a tree filled with white blooms and can’t help but rhapsodize on its beauty. And this segues into her opinions on missionaries as possible marriage partners. To Anne, there’s more to a missionary than just standing in the gap overseas. He can stand in the gap back home, too.
Here are Anne’s remarks from the novel:
“Isn’t that beautiful? What did that tree, leaning out from the bank, all white and lacy, make you think of?” she asked.
“Well now, I dunno,” said Matthew.
“Why, a bride, of course—a bride all in white with a lovely misty veil. I’ve never seen one, but I can imagine what she would look like. I don’t ever expect to be a bride myself. I’m so homely nobody will every want to marry me—uness it might be a foreign missionary. I suppose a foreign missionary mightn’t be very particular. But I do hope that some day I shall have a white dress. That is my highest ideal of earthly bliss.
In a later book, Anne, now in her twenties, is preparing to marry Gilbert Blythe. Her friend Diana asks if she will wear a veil for the ceremony:
Yes, indeedy. I shouldn’t feel like a bride without one. I remember telling Matthew, that evening when he brough me to Green Gables, that I never expected to be a bride because I was so homely no one would ever want to marry me—unless some foreign missionary did. I had an idea then that foreign missionaries couldn’t afford to be finicky in the matter of looks if they wanted a girl to risk her life among cannibals. You should have seen the foreign missionary Priscilla married. He was as handsome and inscrutable as those day-dreams we once planned to marry ourselves, Diana; he was the best dressed man I ever met, and he raved over Priscilla’s “ethereal golden beauty.” But of course there are no cannibals in Japan.
(Lucy Maude Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables, L. C. Page, 1908; Anne’s House of Dreams, McClelland, 1917)
[photo: “Victorian Bride ~ Postcard,” by chicks57, used under a Creative Commons license]
Clearing Customs 